by James Joyce

James Joyce

Born in Dublin, James Joyce (1882–1941) was a modernist and proponent of the stream-of-consciousness writing style and is widely considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His works feature primarily Dublin figures such as in the short story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939).

Our Examination Round His Factifiation for Incamination of Work in Progress is unique among the many books Finnegans Wake has evoked from other writers. This symposium was published in Paris ten years before Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was completed. The contributors were all friends or acquaintances of the authors: Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams.…

Stephen Hero is an early version of Joyce’s famous A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was originally rejected on grounds of indecency—so the story goes—by twenty publishers, whereupon Joyce threw the manuscript in the fire, but Mrs. Joyce rescued several unburnt portions. Although Joyce later entirely rewrote his novel of a young Irishman’s rebellion against church, country and family, this early version is beautifully composed, the mood being more discursive and personal than in A Portrait.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”